Published 4:00 am, Friday, September 14, 2007

Trespass

NAN A. TALESE/DOUBLEDAY; 304 PAGES; $25

In her richly imagined new novel, "Trespass," Valerie Martin plunges the reader into the borderlands between opposing forces: youth and age, exclusion and privilege, alien and native son. The story begins on a foreboding note when Chloe Dales, an engraver and book illustrator, takes her college-age son, Toby, to lunch to meet his new Croatian girlfriend, Salome. Besides being Chloe's physical opposite - dark, flagrantly sensual - Salome responds to Chloe's bubbling attempts at conversation with terse petulance or silence. Chloe dislikes her.

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In "Trespass," characters either give themselves over to paranoia and fear of the outsider, or fight against clannishness and exclusion. Martin sets the story after the Sept. 11 attacks, and a general anxiety and xenophobia infuse the narrative. The story springs easily from Manhattan to Croatia, rural Louisiana to Trieste, suburban Connecticut to the wilds of the English countryside. Each new locale contains a set of boundaries and unspoken rules that force the characters to choose sides.

From the opening scene the characters begin drawing up those lines. Toby's father, Brendan, a history professor at work on a book about the Crusades, welcomes Salome and appreciates his son's taste. When Toby and Salome ask for deposit money to rent an apartment together, Brendan sits contemplating his son:

"So he is going to live with this self-possessed, provocative, unabashedly sensual young woman who will, who can doubt it, take him for a wild ride to parts unknown. There he sits, open, comfortable, his everyday manner in place, confident that his father will understand. ... He hasn't the slightest idea what it is like to live night and day with a desirable woman and he wants to know, he needs to know."

Where Chloe senses a threat, Brendan sees adventure.

Martin's carefully constructed story approaches these family tensions from various paths. A poacher has been trespassing on the Dales' land, hunting in their woods. Where Brendan chooses to ignore the problem, it obsesses his wife. Her detached studio becomes a refuge where she loses herself in her engravings as she attempts to fortify herself against the intrusions of Salome and the poacher.

The idea of the outsider, the poacher, echoes in Chloe's richly described work illustrating "Wuthering Heights." Heathcliff, the outsider of Brontë's novel, becomes symbolic of Chloe's own crumbling universe. Brendan reflects after a particularly vicious confrontation between mother and son over Salome:

"She feels her territory has been invaded and she is under attack. She wants to throw the intruders out, go back to the way things were, but this, she must realize, is not an option, and so she's panicked. They have a poacher and they have a pregnant soon-to-be daughter-in-law; the outsiders are insiders now, staking their claims."

Despite her feelings of isolation, Chloe is not alone in her reactions of fear and mistrust.

Toby, upon meeting Salome's father, Branko, reflects upon his own status as "an intruder, an interloper, yet though everything is unfamiliar, he feels for the moment curiously at home." He feels comfortable in the Louisiana bayou with Salome's father, but her volatile brother, Andro, ensures that the peaceful, pastoral scene will not last. Salome in turn becomes increasingly mysterious and secretive. Toby knows her as well as any of the characters, yet she still tries to shield him from her past. Though Martin's characters may at times graciously accept the differences of others, this is no guarantee of reciprocation.

Woven into the main narrative, a second story with no immediately evident context appears at intervals. A foreign woman narrates, building toward something dark, but Martin leaves the reader guessing as to the identity of the alternate voice. Yet her tone seems familiar, related to the main plot as a Greek chorus voicing the other characters' inner turmoil:

"I was young, I was passionate. I couldn't bear the constrictions of ordinary life, my husband's indifference, the casual cruelty of my in-laws. I turned for comfort and, I admit it, in anger, to a stranger. That's all he was then, later he was an enemy, and once he was an enemy, it was only a matter of time before someone betrayed us, his family or mine." This second narrative clarifies its relationship to the story as the book progresses, and it is in this figure that Martin provides her most self-aware outsider.

"Trespass" provides a searing commentary on the human desire to set boundary lines against threats, perceived and real. It's a testament to Martin's skill as both storyteller and writer that her complex characters defy separation into two camps - those who accept and those who judge. Nothing in "Trespass" is quite as it seems, and that is precisely the point.